How They Did It
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How They Did It: Maya Dardel Shot on a Hermit’s Property to Add Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars in Production Design
Co-directors Zachary Cotler and Magdalena Zyzak share behind-the-scenes stories on the production design and cinematography of Maya Dardel, shooting in confined spaces, and befriending a hermit of...
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How They Did It: First-Time Director Ana Asensio Split Most Beautiful Island Into Two Stylistically Distinct Halves
Making Most Beautiful Island was my first time writing a script and directing a film. Up to this point in my career, I had focused...
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How They Did It: This Director Over-Prepared in Order to Get Novitiate Shot Before a Hard Deadline
The greatest challenge for me in shooting Novitiate was the limited amount of days we had—28, to be exact—to pull off such a performance-heavy movie. I’m sure...
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How They Did It: This Director’s New Doc About Legendary Acting Coach Larry Moss Demystifies the Acting Process
Film has been associated with magic since its inception. Even as a child, the interaction and connection between everyone involved in producing a movie—everybody from...
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How They Did It: Directing a Rape Scene in an Exploitation Film… Without Exploiting Your Female Protagonist
I usually don’t shy away from work that makes me uncomfortable. No matter how much it scares me, I push myself to go there, to...
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How They Did It: Shooting A South Florida Short Film, "Chasing Titles Vol. 1," In Nasty Weather With AK-47s
As the writer, producer and director of “Chasing Titles Vol. 1,” I had a very clear vision of how everything should look going into this...
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How They Did It: To Shoot The Mutineer in 35mm, the Director Took a Scalpel to His Ultra-Low Budget
In 2012, I wrote down the first idea I had for The Mutineer, with the intention of shooting it the next year on black-and-white 35mm...
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How They Did It: The Te Ata Director on Taking Cues from the Chickasaw Nation and Respecting Their Legacy
When I first received the script for Te Ata, I wondered how I might connect with a Native American woman from the early 1900s. Te...
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How They Did It: A Spread-Out Schedule and Streamlined Crew Helped Negative Make Its Days
It was the middle of the night. We were out in the high desert of the Antelope Valley, north of Los Angeles, on our second...
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How They Did It: This Cinematographer Shot and Survived Explosive Wildfires For The Netflix Doc Series Fire Chasers
Exploding propane tanks and live rounds, swirling firestorms, 10-ton airborne retardant drops, invisible fire pits and some of the most explosive fire conditions in a...
Summer 2019
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Summer 2018
Year in MovieMaker
Inside the Issue: Acting
Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker: Richard Dreyfuss
American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stand By Me, Mr. Holland’s Opus… even while reading like a what’s what of cinema, those titles are just a handful...
1Inside the Issue: Directing
Cold Piece of Work: Richard Linklater Braves Greenland Hurricanes for Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette opens with the answer to its titular question. In an impressively executed overhead shot, the camera gazes down onto placid Antarctic waters as...
Inside the Issue: How To
How They Did It: The Farewell Writer-Director Lulu Wang Shares Secrets to Turning Your Life Story into a Memoir Movie
The week before production started on The Farewell—my sophomore feature about a young woman (Billi, played by Awkwafina) and her family’s attempts to keep their grandmother’s cancer diagnosis hidden...